Wordsmith’s and sailor’s delight

Sound Like a Sailor: The Book of Nautical Expressions
by R. Bruce Macdonald

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025
$24.95 /  9781998526239

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

*

I dove straight into this delightful collection of words and phrases that originate on the high seas during the era of sea transport and warfare. Writer, sailor, and artist R. Bruce Macdonald has scoured oceanic history in search of the meaning of everything from “Albatross Around One’s Neck” to “When My Ship Comes In.” The result is a full compendium of terms we often use but have no idea how they arrived in our vocabulary.

The selection includes “As the Crow Flies,” for example: Early sailors would sometimes carry crows to help find the ship’s direction. “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” means a dilemma today, but it referred to a sailor’s position when waterproofing the ship from the outside.

Moving to the Cs, we have “Cut of His Jib,” first used to identify a ship as friend or foe. Under D, “Dressed to the Nines” signified the colourful signal flags on a “well-dressed ship.” The Fs include “Filibuster.” Today it’s a political stalling tactic, but back in the day it meant a “freebooter or pirate.”

Let’s hopscotch over the Gs with their “Godsend” and “Go With the Flow,” and steer straight into “Hoist With His Own Petard,” a reference to the handling of gun powder, then to “Jolly Jumper.” The children’s contraption was invented by an indigenous Canadian woman but the name was used for a particular method of setting sails.

At the Ms, I stopped at “Mark Twain,” the penname of the famous American humourist Samuel Clemens. He chose it when he saw it as a reference to how Mississippi riverboats measure depth. Leapfrogging over “Nausea,” from the Greek for seasickness, and “Old Salt,” for an old sailor long-exposed to sea water, we shift to “Powder Monkeys,” a description of “ship’s boys who carried gun powder to the cannons during battle.”

The Q’s get one entry, “Quarantine,” originally a biblical term referring to Jesus fasting for 40 days but a later reference attributes the term to ships forced to stay offshore for that long or until they were judged disease-free by the showing of a yellow flag.

Running from page 154 to 180, the Ss are close to the longest set of entries. They include “Saloon,” “Scow,” “Scuttle,” “Skookum,” and “St Elmo’s Fire,” which is the name for flashes of static electricity seen in a ship’s rigging during a storm. The flashes told sailors that the storm was ending. Interpret the term as you will. It’s meaning seems unrelated to the 1985 movie about a bar called St. Elmo’s.

“Tackle,” “Taken Aback,” “Tattoo,” and “Tarpaulin” all have a nautical etymology. So do “Walking the Plank,” “Wallop,” “Windbag,” and “Weather a Storm.” However “Your Number is Up” has a less knowable origin. This term refers to a number that an admiral issued to each captain in a flotilla. When the admiral called it, the captain had to face the news, good or bad.

Like any attempt to exhaust a collection of expressions, some will be missed. Take the word masthead. I hoped to find it described as a newspaper staff box or front page name flag. This current usage would be followed by a historical note, explaining that a masthead on a sailing ship identified the top of a mast.

“The Oxford English Dictionary says it usually referred to a place for observation or flying a flag, though it was once a place for punishment,” noted the web site grammarphobia.com. It added that “the earliest citation for ‘masthead’ in the OED is from a 1495 entry in the naval accounts and inventories of King Henry VII: ‘A parell for the mayne Toppe maste ffeble j Garlandes of yron abought the mast hede j’.”

I expected the latter usage to have inspired the former. Somehow, it went overboard in this probing exploration of English usage. Perhaps it didn’t fit Macdonald’s methodology for selecting terms or perhaps he dismissed it as of interest only to the diminishing population of newspaper drudges who would know the term and care if it was included.

But there I go, violating a rule that Macdonald cites in his brief introduction. “This book is an apology of sorts to the number of people I have stopped mid-sentence . . . to offer the aside that a word or term they have employed had its genesis in an old sea term.” Apologies offered here to the author and a big thanks for many hours of amusing and educational exploration of word worthy and seaworthy turns of phrase.

If you’re wondering why the title isn’t Swear Like a Sailor, know that Macdonald’s bibliography includes a book by that title. Fear not, though, there are plenty of references to the salty language of the sea joining literary quotations from poems like The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner and the lyrics of David Bowie’s music. Language and sea-loving readers will enjoy the voyage. 

*

Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron has recently reviewed books by George M. Abbott, Barry Potyondi, Brandon Marriott, Harpreet Sekha, The Simon Fraser University Retirees Association, and Bill Arnott for The British Columbia Review.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster